Technology has an increasingly important impact on divorce. Reports of spouses finding instances of infidelity and other secrets on social media sites like Facebook abound, and these occurrences can cost a spouse during the course of settlement negotiations. One state court in New Jersey recently ruled in favor of a wife who used technology to track her husband whom she suspected was having an affair.

The woman suspected something based on her husband’s strange behavior, so she hired a private investigator to follow him after hours. The investigator had trouble following him all the time, so the woman purchased a GPS tracking device and planted it in the glove compartment of the couple’s SUV. Registration listed them both as owners of the vehicle.

Based on the data from the GPS, the woman figured out that her husband had been to another woman’s house one night. When she confronted her husband with the news, he sued her and her investigator for invasion of privacy. While he eventually dropped the lawsuit against his wife, he continued on with the suit against the investigator, and the case reached the appeals level, where a panel of judges weighed privacy against Fourth Amendment concerns. The judges ruled in favor of the investigator, as they found that the husband had no right to expect privacy because the GPS tracked his movements on public streets. The US Supreme Court will decide a similar case in the coming months that could have far-reaching implications for both cheating spouses and criminals.